“The 36th Statistical Report on the Internet Development in China” shows that as of June 2015, the number of Internet users in China has reached 668 million while the number of mobile Internet users has reached 594 million, accounting for 88.9% of the Internet users. The trend of mobile phones as the main terminals for accessing the Internet was further evident. Meanwhile, the “Research Report on Internet User Behavior in 2014” shows that by the end of June 2014, the number of search engine users in China reached 507.49 million, which accounts for 80.3% of Internet users. The number of mobile search engine users reached 405.83 million, which accounts for 77.0% of mobile Internet users. Users download a large number of applications through their smartphones, which play important roles in their daily lives, study, work, and entertainment. According to statistics, an average of 60 or even more applications are installed on each smart mobile terminal. The number of applications on each application distribution platform of Google Play and Apple Store has reached millions, with application downloads reaching tens of billions of times.
More and more people use apps installed on their mobile device to access the Internet and to a large extent, retrieve information through search engines. However, it is noticed that although search engines exist in many forms, their main source of content is from the websites. Since existing applications want to keep as many users as possible, they limit content and services in their own applications to provide unique services to attract customers. While there are a few of applications provide web-based applications that can be indexed and retrieved by search engine engines, most of the applications that mobile users heavily rely on now are in fact isolated “islands”. A very simple example can illustrate the situation: when a user sees information about a movie when browsing news, the user has to open a video application, and searches for the film and watch related videos in the application; or opens a movie application, and then views the movie's playing time, venue, and other information, and purchase the movie tickets online. If the user has more complex needs, he or she may have to open a lot of applications, through tedious and redundant manual operations to achieve their goals.